Gosh, I must have scored a direct hit in my October 4th article for it to elicit the knockabout rhetoric Mary Harney displayed in her reply (October 11th).
Interestingly she side-steps any attempt to deal with the specific issues I raised. In any event my questions were directed at Fianna Fail. They still are, even more so after Mary's article.
Everything she writes pinpoints the need for more, not less, social spending, for more, not less, public intervention in health, education, law and order. She can't honestly square her rhetoric with her usual mantra on less State spending.
I find her assurances on pensions to be as convincing as Margaret Thatcher's "the National Health Service is safe in my hands" claim. Whenever the PD-style recipes for reduced public spending are tried it is the elderly who get hit first. Call it scare-mongering if you like. It's no less true for all that.
New Zealand is a case in point with penal surcharges, up to 85 per cent in some cases, on those with income other than their old age pension.
Ironically, just as Mary was defending the NZ recipe the voters there were on the way to the polling stations to reject the very policies she is prescribing for us. A salutary lesson. I've followed some of the campaign arguments there through the Internet, and undoubtedly it is the harsh social results of the policies pursued there that turned voters to the Labour-led alliance that seems likely to form the new government.
Mary's article offers no assurance of any lessening in her disdain for the basic policy of social partnership this Government follows as did its FF/Labour predecessor. I presume this is observed with dismay in FF because it cuts the ground from the credibility of a FF/PD alliance. These parties are poles apart and have no more capacity to form an effective government than they had in the dismal years of '91 and '92.
I'm sure Mary will call that scaremongering, too. It sure is, because the memory of that particular Government is definitely scary. - Yours, etc., Minister of State, Dail Eireann, Dublin 2. PS: George Orwell, in Politics and the English Language, expressed particular contempt for politicians who use double negatives. "A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field". What would he have made of Mary's "not untypical community"?